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Wednesday, May 19, 2010

This is the story of a loser that couldn’t be saved, a palooka in green cloth boards that went down for a very long count, three limbs on the canvas, the other hanging onto the ropes for dear life. Though other sanctioning bodies may disagree, it holds the WBA crown for Worst-Selling Book of All Time.

Charlotte Brontë’s first published book was a flop; only two copies - two copies! - were sold in its first year of publication. The publisher couldn’t give the book away.

The book was Poems (1846), a collection by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, the sisters writing under the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell so that their work would be taken seriously. "We had the vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice" (as cited in the Preface to the 1910 edition of Emily's Wuthering Heights). Charlotte (Currer) contributed nineteen poems, Emily (Ellis) and Anne (Acton) twenty-one each.

Charlotte Brontë, a colored drawing, 1873.

The publisher couldn’t give them away but Charlotte Brontë could, distributing copies to Tennyson and other contemporary authors. Not that it did much good. Only one critic paid much attention to it, and he only had good things to say about the poems written by Emily (“Ellis”), which possessed “a fine quaint spirit” (Sydney Dobell, The Athenaeum, July 4, 1846), hardly a critical ovation.

Emily Brontë.

One thousand copies of Poems were printed by the publisher, Aylott and Jones in London, May 1846 but with approximately 960 sets of unused sheets all printed up with no profitable place to go, they were put into storage.

Anne Brontë.

Not so by the way, Charlotte Brontë paid for the cost of the book’s paper and printing, £31.10s.

“In the space of a year our publisher has disposed of but two copies, and by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of these two, himself only knows” (Charlotte Brontë to Thomas De Quincey).

The sales total was so depressing that it’s a wonder Brontë didn’t escape with De Quincey into opium.

And then a little book titled Jane Eyre “edited by” Currer Bell came along in 1847. Charlotte “Currer Bell” Brontë was no longer bookshop poison. Its publisher, Smith, Elder and Co., hoping to capitalize on Jane’s Eyre’s success, bought the 960 or so remaining sheets and bindings of Poems from Aylott and Jones. Many of the old bindings were restamped and new title pages (cancels) for the Smith imprint were added yet these inserted title pages retained the 1846 original date of publication. Beyond these cosmetics, there were no textual changes.

First edition, first printing, second issue (1848).

And so, there are two issues of the first edition, first printing, the Aylott and Jones, and Smith, Elder & Co.; the former obviously the book’s first appearance.

Smith and Elder’s roll of the dice with Poems came up snake-eyes. It took fourteen years for the initial print run of 1000 to sell out. That’s an average of sixty-nine people a year buying copies. A book that sells steadily over time is considered to be an evergreen title; it stays green, like money, no matter what the season. Poems, however, falls into a different class, the everlame, books that pathetically limp along, year after year, gasping for breath and refusing to die.

The second issue of Poems had many binding variants over subsequent years. In The Bronte Sisters: A Bibliographical Catalogue, Walter E. Smith believes that the light green binding with fancy harp "represents, I believe, more truly than any other the initial Smith, Elder publication effort and isolates it from some vestiges of the bibliographical confusion that resulted from the purchase of unsold quires and binding cases from Aylott and Jones" (Smith I, note 1).

First edition, first printing, second issue, first state binding.

In 1848, Lea & Blanchard of Philadelphia, gulled by Jane Eyre’s success, published an American edition of Poems. It, too, took a ten-count.

Yet Emily Brontë’s poetry has stood the test of time; she is considered to be one of the great English lyric poets. Emily Dickinson was a fan, was inspired by her, and thought so highly of Emily Brontë's poetry that she chose "No coward soul is mine" to be read at her funeral:

No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven's glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

0 God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest As I Undying Life, have power in Thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts, unutterably vain, Worthless as withered weeds Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by thy infinity So surely anchored on The steadfast rock of Immortality